How Israel erased a town of 200,000

The day the flour finally ran out, and the roof of their two-story house no longer held back the rain, Abdullah Abu Saif’s family gently lifted the 82-year-old grandfather onto a donkey cart and fled Jabalia.

Weak from hunger, deaf from months of air strikes and vaguely aware that he might never return, Abu Saif asked his young grandson to help him. He wanted to see the landmarks of his life one last time: the wedding hall where he married four sons; the school where he studied, then taught; The cemetery where his parents were buried.

But on that November day “there was nothing to see – nothing left, just rubble and rubble”, said his son Ibrahim. “His whole life was erased. All that remains is his memory.”

Nowhere in Gaza has escaped the destructive force of the Israeli military and its ferocious bombardment since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel that triggered the war, which officials now hope may end with a cease-fire.

But nowhere was it more completely destroyed than Jabalia, a once-ancient city that gave its name to a nearby refugee camp after the 1948 war.

It has become one of the largest camps in the Palestinian territories, with an estimated 200,000 people living in and around Jabalia — including more than 100,000 officially registered refugees, according to UN and local officials.

Its history traces the tragic arc of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, born at the end of one war and destroyed in another – a graveyard of memories that once held them in place.

No one has ever described Jabalia as beautiful, especially the camp itself. But it has always been a buzzing, vibrant part of Palestinian life: prayers at Al-Awda Mosque, protests over shawarma in Six Martyrs Roundabout, blessed romances at nearby Baghdad Wedding Hall.

Shoppers traveled from around Gaza to the busy bazaar in the camp, lured by its cheap prices as well as ice cream and cakes from the famous al-Jatun store in the heart of the souk.

The landmark three-story Al-Qadi “Oriental Sweets Building,” selling pastries including its famous pistachio-stuffed baklava, was another magnet. Locals gather in its halls for birthday parties, while thousands pre-order plates of pastries to celebrate high school exam results.

The Jabalia Service Sports Club was the heart of football-obsessed Gaza, hosting local matches while the nearby Raba’a Cafe showed games from Europe’s Champions League to the Egyptian Premier League. Performers sing and play the oud at the cafe’s music nights.

So relentless has the Israeli offensive been, and so complete the destruction — not only in Jabalia, but also in nearby Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun — that a former Israeli defense minister late last year described the army’s move into northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.”

“There is no bit of Hanun. Bit Lahiya is not. they are [the Israeli military] Currently working in Jabalia and basically they are clearing the area of ​​Arabs,” Moshe Ya’alon told local TV. Condemned for his comments, he doubled down, telling a second interviewer that “it’s ethnic cleansing – there’s no other word for it”.

From the air, the Jabalia refugee camp is now acres of rubble, as far as drones can see, its once-striking streets buried under the rubble of thousands of homes. Across the Strip, more than 46,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local officials.

From the ground it is unimaginable horror, said Ibrahim al-Kharabishi, a lawyer who refused to leave. During the Israeli raid, he, his wife and four children hid in a corner of their house. He dodges an Israeli quadcopter to gather food to survive.

“We see dead bodies that no one dares to move as far as the eye can see. We hear calls for help from the injured and some of them die,” he said. “The person who feels brave enough to help them falls by their side, and then we hear two voices calling for help instead of one.”

The poet Mosab Abu Toha grew up in nearby Beit Lahiya. He fled first to Egypt, then to Syracuse, New York. All she has left to pass on to her children are stories.

His library of thousands of books was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes. “I leave the door of my room open,” he wrote in one poem, “so that the sounds of my book may escape at the sound of the bomb.”

This, he said, was the tragedy of the Palestinian refugee experience since 1948: repeated forced displacement during conflict, even from temporary homes in refugee camps in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, with the hope of returning to ancestral homes in Jaffa, Haifa or Ramle. .

“We are being pushed further away from our homeland and memories that we should preserve,” he said. “For us, now that this camp is destroyed, it is the destruction of the history of refugees that lasted for almost 76 years.”

Jabalia is big on both Israeli and Palestinian stories. The first intifada, or uprising, erupted from its crowded streets in 1987 after an Israeli truck driver rammed and killed three Palestinians from the camp, expressing anger over decades of Israeli occupation of the territory.

But its dense, chaotic growth in a concrete jungle no more than two square kilometers from a makeshift camp after the 1948 war also points to a critical issue at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the right of return for Palestinians who fled their homes. which eventually became Israel, and the generations of their descendants.

By the time Hajj Alian Fares was born in 1955, the camp had begun to take shape. The United Nations agency for Palestinians, UNRWA, has built small houses of cement and corrugated iron, with rooms no larger than three square meters. The whole family will crowd into them. There were no toilets in the houses and residents had to fetch water from distant taps.

Now, displaced in the ruins of another camp, Fares, 69, has a dream: If Israel ever withdraws, he will pitch a tent on the ruins of his home and stay there until Jabalia is rebuilt.

“Jabalia camp is my city, it is my city. Everything I have is in Jabalia,” he said, his voice nearly drowned out by Israeli drones. “I’d feel weird anywhere outside of Jabalia.”

A key sticking point in the ceasefire talks is whether Israel will allow the return of millions of people who have fled northern Gaza. Anyone who returns will return to a landscape torn apart by the IDF’s aggression, including the current operation, which Israel says is aimed at stopping the regrouping of Hamas. More than 50 Israeli soldiers were killed in the northern operation.

The health ministry has so far registered 2,500 deaths in the northern operation, but with so many bodies rotting in the streets – some even eaten by stray dogs – local officials believe the actual number is twice that. The only medical facility still in commission, the Indonesian Hospital, is barely functioning, doctors said.

For more than three months, Israel has allowed little food. UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher said at the X that aid agencies had made 140 attempts to reach besieged civilians between October and the end of December, but had “almost zero access”. .

The IDF denies that it is implementing so-called “The generals plan“, proposed by former national security adviser Giora Eiland, involved the population of northern Gaza by using force and refusing humanitarian aid.

A senior Israeli official, however, said northern Gaza “will never be the same again”. Many of the Israeli kibbutzim targeted by Hamas in the October 7 attack, which killed 1,200 people according to Israeli officials, were near the north of the Strip.

“You can call it a buffer zone, you can call it agricultural land, you can call it whatever you want, but there will be more. [physical] Separation between Israeli communities and Palestinian towns.”

Relief workers say that more than a few thousand people will not be able to stay. Some adamantly refused to be evicted from their land. Others are too poor or sick to move. Their protected status under international law may offer some scant security, hoping for some trouble within barely functioning hospitals.

Abed Abu Gasan was sheltering in a school near the Indonesian hospital. Throughout the day he heard artillery and explosions as Israeli engineering corps destroyed belt after belt of houses, many of them posting videos online of footage the IDF tried to contain. In some videos, Israeli soldiers are laughing uncontrollably, playing music and dancing while destroying houses.

Human rights groups, including Amnesty International and UN experts, have condemned Israel’s destruction of civilian property, saying the actions may violate international law if it does not serve a clear military purpose.

The Israeli military said its actions in Gaza and Jabaliya were “necessary to implement a defense plan that will provide improved security in southern Israel”.

It said its Jabalia operations focused on eliminating Hamas’ northern Gaza brigades, which were “systematically exploiting civilian centers”.

“The IDF takes possible precautions to minimize damage to civilian infrastructure, civilian populations and evacuations in relevant areas,” the statement said, claiming its troops encountered neighborhoods converted to “combat complexes used for surprise attacks.”

“It goes without saying that there is no IDF doctrine aimed at maximizing damage to civilian infrastructure,” it said.

From within Jabalia, terror is magnified by the industrial nature of destruction. Abu Ghassan said entire areas were leveled: Fakhoura, Fallujah and Abu Sharif.

“I stayed despite the famine,” he said, between bursts. “We northerners worship it here, but the situation has become catastrophic: starvation, fear and the destruction of every building.”

Ten days after speaking to the FT, his family said, Abu Ghassan was dead: killed in an Israeli airstrike in his beloved Beit Lahiya, dying in the rubble of northern Gaza he refused to abandon.